Word: musician
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world's zaniest musician, pun-loving, Danish-born Pianist Victor Borge, showed no signs of flagging as he prepared to play his way this week into the second year's run of his one-man Broadway hit show, Comedy in Music. Borge's witty (and programless) keyboard romp has pleasantly parted 230,400 customers from some $775,000 of their money, has outdistanced all long-run records for one-performer Broadway offerings...
...Musician by inclination and wit by trade, Kansas City-born Virgil Thomson studied music in Paris (after Harvard), was an organist, choirmaster and freelance writer on music before he went to the Herald Tribune. He left New York's music public gasping with his very first column, a deft and devastating panning of the sacrosanct Philharmonic-Symphony ("the sombre and spiritless sonority of a German military band"). Thereafter, he shaded old-style critics by his saucy phrases, e.g., hearing Violinist Jascha Heifetz overpower a sonatina "made one feel . . . that one had somehow got on the Queen Mary...
...Thomson's musical taste buds respond best to French music, and his own scores (Louisiana Story, Four Saints in Three Acts) resemble it in their neatness, transparent textures and often, inconsequence. His departure leaves a gap in the ranks of U.S. music journalism: there is now no practicing musician in its top ranks, no dedicated champion of modern U.S. composers. His post on the Trib will be filled by Columbia University's Budapest-born Music-Historian Paul Henry Lang, author of the scholarly, 1043-page Music in Western Civilization. Quips one friend: "He thinks music ceased to exist...
...musician knows, it takes a lot of brass to be a tuba player. Generally, tubas range in size from the B-flat tenor (10 Ibs., 151 in. of tubing), which is hugged to the player's chest and sometimes goes pah-pah, to the large, economy-size B-flat bass (29 Ibs., 387 in.), which is often worn somewhat like a life preserver and mostly goes oompah. One thing that tuba players have in common is a fear that audiences are laughing at them. To many nonmusicians, indeed, the tuba appears absurd -there is always some fellow...
...Dichter compiled an impressive catalogue of old American sheet music, began selling it to collectors. Then he decided that reprints of the sheet music would find a greater audience. His first big publication was an edition of delicate melodies titled Seven Songs for the Harpsichord, by Musician:Politico Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791). Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had sent his work to George Washington, received a polite acknowledgement from the President: ". . . what alas! can I do to support it? I can neither sing one of the songs nor raise a note on any instrument to convince...